Please sign this petition

Friday, June 2, 2017

Zbigniew Brzezinski by Paul Craig Roberts

Brzezinski’s death at 89 years of age has generated a
load of propaganda and disinformation, all of which serves one interest group
or another or the myths that people find satisfying. I am not an expert on
Brzezinski, and this is not an apology for him. He was a Cold Warrior, as
essentially was everyone in Washington during the Soviet era.

For 12 years Brzezinski was my collague at the Center
for Strategic and International Studies, where I occupied the William E. Simon
Chair in Political Economy. When I was elected to that chair, CSIS was a part
of Georgetown University. However, the president of Georgetown Univerity was
one of those liberals who hated Henry Kissinger, who was also our colleague,
and the university president also hated Ronald Reagan for his rhetoric, not for
his deeds about which the Georgetown president was uninformed. So I also was
unwelcome. Whatever I was worth to CSIS, Kissinger was worth more, and CSIS was
not going to give up Henry Kissinger.Therefore the strategic research institute split from Georgetown university.
Brzezinski stayed with CSIS.

When my 1971 book, Alienation and the Soviet
Economy, which had circulated clandestinely inside the Economic Institute
of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in mimeographed form for years, was
republished in 1990 with an introduction by University of California, Berkeley,
Professor Aaron Wildavsky, Brzezinski, along with Robert Conquest and two
members of the USSR Academy of Sciences, provided cover endorsements for my
book. Brzezinski wrote: “Professor Roberts’ explanation of Soviet economic
development is timely, and it fills a noticeable void in the existing literature.
The book is beneficial reading for experts and non-experts alike who wish to
understand the theoretical Marxian framework within which the Soviet economy
grew and declined.”

I quote his endorsement for two reasons. One is to
show upfront that I might be biased in my account of Brzezinski. The other is
to establish that both Brzezinski and I did not regard the Soviet Union as a
long-term threat. I expected the Soviet economy to fail, which it did, and
Brzezinski expected the Soviet Union to breakup along nationality lines, which
it did under Washington’s supervision. Although we were both Cold Warriors—I
was a member of the Committee on the Present Danger—both of us favored a
peaceful, not a war or conflict resolution of the Cold War. Brzezinski was most
certainly not a Neoconservative determined to remove Russia as a constraint on
American unilateralism. Brzezinski, as National Security Advisor to President
Carter, did not prevent SALT 2, which the Carter Administration honored despite
the refusal of the US Senate to ratify it.

Brzezinski was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1928. His
father was a Polish diplomat posted to Germany and the Soviet Union. In 1938
Brzezinski’s father was posted to Montreal, Canada, as Consul General. The
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the Yalta Conference in which Churchill and FDR
assigned Poland to the “Soviet sphere of influence” resulted in Brzezinski
growing up in Canada where he was educated. Subsequently he obtained a Ph.D.
from Harvard University and became a professor at that university. Brzezinski
has all the conspiracy marks against him. He was a member of the Council on
Foreign Relations and the Bilderberg Group. Fortunately for me, when I was
nominated for membership in the Council on Foreign Relations, I was blackballed.

Brzezinski being Polish and his wife also being
Eastern European is enough to explain his animosity toward Russia. However,
Brzezinski was not a warmonger. He was an advisor to Hubert Humphrey’s
presidential campaign, advocated de-escalation of US involvement in the Vietnam
war and resigned from a US State Department position in protest to Washington’s
expansion of the Vietnam war.

Simultaniously, he opposed George McGovern’s pacifism.

In my opinion, for what it is worth, Brzezinski wanted
to make sure that America held on long enough for the Soviet Union to collapse
from its internal contradictions. Brzezinski did not seek to impose American
world hegemony. This is a neoconservative goal, not a Cold Warrior’s goal. As
President Reagan emphasized, the point of “winning” the Cold War was to end it,
not to achieve hegemony over the other party. Brzezinski’s strategy as National
Security Advisor toward luring the Soviets into Afghanistan was to weaken the
Soviet Union and, thereby, hasten an end to the Cold War.

These are the facts as I experienced them. If I am
correct, the truth is different from what we are hearing both from the Russian
and Western media, both of which portray Brzezinski as not only evil in wanting
to destroy the Soviet Union, but also as the Cold Warrior who created the Cold
War, a war that had begun three decades prior to Brzezinski’s rise as National
Security Advisor.

It is ironic that Brzezinski’s approach to the Soviet
Union is identical to Russia’s approach to the West today.Brzezinski prefered
in place of Nixon/Kissenger detente to emphasize international law and human
rights. This is Putin’s approach today toward Washington and Washington’s NATO
vassals.

As I recall, Brzezinsky wanted to use ideas, like V in V
for Vendetta, against the Soviets and not military force. This, if memory
serves, was the difference between Brzezinsky and the military/security
complex, which preferred force, and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, who
preferred arms control.

I was born into The Marrix. It took many decades,
insider experience, and fortuitous experiences for me to escape. Brzezinski
might have been one of the fortuitous events. I remember him telling me that as
National Security Advisor he was awakened in the middle of the night with the
message that a couple hundred Soviet ICBMs were on their way to America. Before
he could clear his mind, he was told that it was several thousand ICBMs on
their way to destroy America. As the futility of a response hit him, a third
message reached him that it was all a mistake from a training exercise somehow
being transferred into the early warning network.

In other words, Brzezinsky understood how easy it was
for mistakes to launch a nuclear holocaust. He wanted to end the Cold War for
the same reason that Ronald Reagan wanted to end the Cold War. To make
Brzezinsky and Reagan the villians, as the left-wing does, when the real
villians are the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes that have convinced
Russia that Washington is preparing a nuclear first strike on Russia, is a form
of ideological idiocy.

But idiocy in the West is what we live with. The
question is: how much longer can we survive our idiocy?

I think that the “Soviet Threat,” the basis for the
Cold War, was a hoax. It was created by the military/security complex, about
which President Eisenhower warned us to no effect. The patriotic war movies,
the patriotic Memorial Days and July 4ths with emotional thanks to those who
died “saving our freedoms,” which were never in danger from the Japanese and
Germans, only from our own government, succeeded in brainwashing even National
Security Advisors. Little wonder the insouciance of the American population
today.

The Cold War was an orchestration of the
military/security complex, and there are many victims. Brzezinsky was a victim
as the Cold War was his life. JFK was a victim as he lost his life to it. The
Vietnamese, who died in the millions, were victims The photo of the naked young
Vietnamese girl fleeing down the road in terror from the American napham behind
her made us aware that the Cold War had many innocent victims. The Soviet
troops sent to Afghanistan were victims as were the Afghans themselves.

The Soviet Threat removed itself when hardline
communists arrested Soviet President Gorbachev. This ill-conceived intervention
collapsed the Soviet Union. With the Soviet Threat removed, the US
military/security complex no longer had a justification for its massive budget.

Treading water while looking for a new justification
for bleeding the American taxpayer, the military/security complex had President
Clinton declare the US to be the World Policeman and to destroy Yugoslavia in
the name of “human rights.”With Israeli and neoconservative input, the
military/security complex used 9/11 to create the “Muslin Terrorist Threat.”
This hoax has now murdered, maimed, dispossessed, and displaced milions of
Muslims in seven countries.

Despite 16 years of Washington’s wars against
countries ranging from North Africa to Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan, the “Muslim
threat” does not suffice to justify the $1.1 trillion US military/security
annual budget. Consequently, the Russian Threat has been resurrected.

The Muslim Threat was never a danger to the US. It is
only a danger to Washington’s European vassal states, who had to accept
millions of Muslim refugees from Washington’s wars. However, the newly created
Russian Threat is a threat to every American as well as to every European.

Russia can bite back. For a quarter century Russia has
watched Washington prepare for a paralyzing nuclear strike on Russia. Recently,
the Russian High Command announced that the Russian military has concluded that
Washington does intend a surprise nuclear strike against Russia.

This dire Russian announcement received no western
press coverage. No high official of any Western government, Trump included,
called Putin to give reassurances that no such attack on Russia was being
planned.

So, what happens next time when a false alarm, such as
the one Brzezinsky received, is received by his counterpart in Moscow or the
National Security Council? Will the anamosities resurrected by the evil US
military/security complex result in the Russians or the US believing the false
signal?

The insouciant populations of the West, including the
members of the governments, do not appreciate that they are living on the edge
of nuclear destruction.

The very few of us who alert you are dismissed as
“Russian agents,” “anti-semites,” and “conspiracy theorists.” When you hear a
source called a “Russian agent,” an “anti-semite,” or a “conspiracy theorist,”
you had better listen to them. These are those in the know who accept arrow
slings in order to tell you the truth.

The most important truth of our time is that the world
lives on the knife-edge of the American military/security complex’s need for an
enemy in order to keep profits flowing.The brutal fact is this: For the sake
of its profits, the American military/security complex has subjected the entire
world to the risk of nuclear Armageddon.